Emma Cocker is a writer-artist whose research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the performing of thinking-in-action therein. Cocker’s language-based artistic research comprises a matrix of writing, reading and conversation practices, including diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Cocker’s writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018; Live Coding: A User's Manual, 2023, and in the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and How Do You Do?, 2024. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. She is Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University.

Conference: Aesthetics + Knowledge

In July we - Alex Arteaga | Emma Cocker | Nicole Wendel | Sabine Zahn – shared aspects of our collaborative research project, thinking aesthetic thinking through aesthetic research practices, as part of the Aesthetik und Erkenntnis (Aesthetics and Knowledge),  July 13th to 15th, 2021, XI. Congress of the German Society for Aesthetics, Zurich University of the Arts. For this context, our aim was the  live activation of what we call an ecology of aesthetic research practices - a set of interconnected aesthetic practices in action - which aim to provide conditions for evidence of what aesthetic thinking might be. The performed practices are not presented as illustrative examples but rather as aesthetic thinking in action — as ongoing processes of research through aesthetic practices, as an emerging ecology of aesthetic research practices.

For more on our activation for the conference see here 

For more on the conference see here